Interactive Flash Merchandising

Anyone who manages an e-commerce website will (or should!) always be looking for ways to improve conversion rates from the homepage. For fashion brands this will be no exception. Each season fashion marketers work with creative teams or agencies to produce glorious campaign imagery or videos to support the new collection or season theme. Often a majority of the images or videos created for collection campaigns aren’t ever or rarely seen by the customer and so become unappreciated.

Ecommerce managers strive to find ways to quicken the visitor process from the website homepage to product to purchase and checkout. There are a growing number of solutions to help this, such as ‘quick buy’ and deep linking, but a new method that is surely to become more and more popular is called flash merchandising.

So what is it? Flash merchandising is a unique tool that combines flash media and ‘quick buy’ functionality. Think about any flash websites you have seen or flash videos you have watched, have you ever been able to purchase directly from them? likely not! until now…

Now we can create rich collection campaigns in the form of videos and imagery and allow viewers to purchase directly through the material they’re viewing, so there is less need to visit the product detail page. A website that uses this technology is Tesco Clothing who use flash merchandising on their homepage and allow visitors to  click directly onto a product embedded into a flash panel and purchase from it without navigating from the homepage. See below.

In the above example you can see how Tesco Clothing use flash merchandising to promote World Cup sales and allow visitors to buy featured products from the homepage. Needless to say, this technology is doing wonders for increasing homepage conversion rates.

Its something I think will work wonders for enhancing fashion campaigns online. Its an opportunity to engage customers even more into online media and really maximise ROI. With this technology marketers should ask themselves; why continue to spend enormous budgets on producing campaigns without a method to measure its success? Online marketeers constantly analyse every inch of their website, so now lets allow offline marketers the same opportunity.